UNet Server Hosting Services ?

Hello Community! I was wondering how would I go about finding a website or dedicated server to host my game? Would I be renting a server from someone and using their IP and Port? I'm clueless as to how I can setup my game for live play and connection.. any help is appreciated !

 

Amazon / Digital oceon

 

That's a simple question with a complicated answer. That's because it all depends on the services your server will need to host. First you need to figure out how you want your network architecture to work, to determine if you need a server at all for starters. If you used Unity Multiplayer services and players hosted the games then you may not even need your own server. Same thing goes for something like Photon Cloud.

Assuming you already figured out you need one, you need to properly scope what that server will do. Will your server host game simulation instances? If so how many? Will your server just act as a game lobby? Will it just host some sort of global chat service?

After you scope what services your server will need to host, then you can start figuring out how demanding those services will be. You can start with some rough estimates, but for the best numbers you'd probably want to test with either an early server build of your game, or at least a prototype. What you're looking for is your CPU, RAM, and network needs primarily, but additionally disk or database access as well.

After you at least come up with some estimates, then you can start pricing potential servers. You have at least 3 primary options. Note that every provider seems to have their own spin on how they charge you. Some charge for bandwidth, others it is free, others put an arbitrary cap on total usage, some charge a lot for disks but seem to give away CPU, while others do the reverse, etc.

1) Public Cloud - These are the Amazon and Azure type services. They have a myriad of options and sizes available, and are very quick to set up, but expect to pay a premium over other options for all but the smallest of servers.

2) VPS - This is a fancy hosting term that just refers to a VM (virtual machine) running on their hardware that is sharing that hardware with other VM's. Its not unlike a VM you could set up on your home desktop in Virtualbox or on your own at home Linux server in something like KVM. As a general rule VM's may have somewhat degraded performance for a game due to the virtualization layer and the fact you could be sharing the hardware with some other performance hogging customers. This may not matter at all though for something like a lobby or chat server, where a half second hiccup here and there, or other general sluggishness, are rather meaningless.

3) Dedicated Server - Here you're getting the full performance of the server hardware and are sure you're not sharing anything with other customers except the datacenter's network pipe. This is arguably the first option to consider if you're hosting game simulations that need good performance. The biggest downside is you're going to be paying for the entire server per month. Cost is generally going to be higher than a VPS, but potentially lower than comparable performance from a Public Cloud provider. Another big negative is your game is tied to a specific piece of hardware, where if it fails you'll need to wait until they fix it. Public Cloud, and to a lesser extent a VPS, hardware issues are largely transparent (they move you to good hardware and you're back going quickly, if you even notice at all).

 

Thank you for this response was very insightful. This seems to be a huge process if your new to all this, so primarily for now I might have to make my game work with Unitys built in multiplayer and have players host their own rooms, eventually if and once my game reaches a larger size and more players I might have to upgrade to one of these. My game is almost like a rust type game, I'm not sure how rust runs their server I think I saw something like Command Prompt for windows but thank you so much for taking the time to respond to my question and give me a detailed response. I now understand its defiantly not a simple task and may take me some time.

 

Yeah deciding on a hosting provider and what kind of server you need is closer to the last step in the process rather than something you decide early. For a game I'm developing I already have my network architecture figured out, and set up an at home Linux server to use as a test server. Enable port forwarding on your router so that friends can connect to your game and help with QA. Then use information you gather during that to figure out the server requirements you will have when hundreds or thousands of players are using your game and you'll know more or less what kind of hosting you'll need.